About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

The Contagion Of Evil

The Black Prison: The United States new detention facility on Bagram Airbase a few kilometres north of Kabul in Afghanistan. Recent revelations concerning the behaviour of the NZDF in that country - most particularly its use of US surveillance facilities to monitor the activities of freelance war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, raise real fears that the evil represented by Bagram's torture chambers is on the point of infecting New Zealand.

THE BAGRAM DETENTION FACILITY was a dark lake of evil, its
opaque depths constantly replenished by a thousand tributaries of
officially-sanctioned moral depravity. Behind the razor-wire and watch-towers;
beyond the foot patrols and guard-dogs; far away from the searchlight-beams and
the constantly turning CCTV cameras; deeds were done in the name of our “very,
very, very good friends” that only the sickest kind of sadist could observe
with equanimity.

To the people of Afghanistan, the innocent as well as the
guilty, Bagram became a byword for terror, torture, and the exercise of all the
other brutal forms of utterly unaccountable American power.

In March of this year the Bagram Detention Facility, located
within the sprawling American airbase of the same name, was handed over to the
Afghan Government. It is now known as the Afghan National Detention Facility –
proof – according to the American commander of the International Security
Assistance Force, General Joseph Dunford, of ISAF’s success in building “an
increasingly confident, capable and sovereign Afghanistan.”

Shortly before the formal handover, however, an undisclosed
number of prisoners were allegedly moved to a new US-controlled facility – still
located within the perimeter wire of the airbase – and known simply as the
“Black Prison”. Former detainees also report that US personnel continue to have
“access” to the prisoners (or what’s left of them) being held under
Afghanistan’s putative authority.

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) still has military
intelligence personnel stationed at Bagram Airbase. A former NZDF resident
describes it in terms of a small American town uplifted in its entirety and
relocated within sight of the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush. She did not
reveal the purpose of her posting.

But now, thanks to the extraordinary investigative
journalism of Nicky Hager, we all know what at least one of New Zealand’s
military and intelligence personnel was doing at Bagram Airbase. He or she was
spying on another of this country’s extraordinary investigative journalists
(and our only war correspondent worthy of the name) Jon Stephenson.

Jon’s stories from Afghanistan, stripped of all their
incidental detail, have been about only one thing: the contagion of evil.

Over and over again he has revealed how sending good-hearted
New Zealand soldiers to Afghanistan, a war that was, most probably, initiated
illegally, and which has, most certainly, been conducted immorally, was bound
to result in their slow but certain corruption.

The most vivid confirmation of evil’s contagious effect came
in Jon’s award-winning Metro magazine
article, “Eyes Wide Shut”, in which he detailed how New Zealand’s troops had
repeatedly been obliged to hand over prisoners to US and Afghan authorities, in
whose custody, the Kiwis were reasonably sure, they would be subjected to
assault and torture.

It was through the increasingly desperate attempts of the
NZDF to deny that these events ever happened, and then to discredit the
journalist whose detailed and highly accurate reportage constantly undermined
those efforts, that some of Bagram’s evil began flowing into the bloodstream of
the New Zealand body politic.

Nicky Hager’s story reveals an NZDF so rattled by Jon
Stephenson’s investigative reporting that its own security manual included
“certain investigative journalists” among its most dangerous antagonists. Or,
in Mr Hager’s own words, putting probing journalists up there “on the same list
as the KGB and al Qaeda.”

Both affronted and alarmed by Jon Stephenson’s unrelenting
reportage, the NZDF turned to the Americans’ vast intelligence-gathering
operation for assistance. They also enlisted the aid of New Zealand’s principal
security and intelligence gathering agency, the SIS, to root out the
journalist’s contacts and sources.

To the NZDF, Stephenson was no longer simply a conscientious
journalist attempting to inform his fellow citizens of their government’s
actions and hold it to account. He was now regarded as a “subversive”: someone
determined to “weaken the military, economic or political strength of a nation
by undermining the morale, loyalty or reliability of its citizens.”

Here we see the contagion of evil in all its chilling menace.

Telling the truth has become a subversive act. Informing the
public that their soldiers are at risk of becoming embroiled in acts contrary
to international law – to war crimes – is now tantamount to aiding the enemy:
to treason.

And so, drop by drop, the Bagram poison enters our system.
Our Government, determined to avoid further embarrassment by “certain
investigative journalists” intends to empower our own Government Communications
Security Bureau to assist the NZDF in tracking-down and identifying their
sources.

As they did in Afghanistan, they will use the latest
intelligence-gathering technology to acquire “metadata” – landline and
cellphone logs, e-mail and text traffic - to identify the likes of Jon
Stephenson’s and Nicky Hager’s friends and associates; contacts and sources.

Among them will be my own name and telephone numbers.

Bagram will have come home. The contagion of evil will be at
my door.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
30 July 2013.

Chris,simply by you changing a couple of settings you can rid this wonderful blog of needing commentors to prove they are not a robot. There is a setting that allows publication of the comment after your approval. It's simple and removes having to identify these inane letters which can be so difficult to decifer...

During the 1984-5 miners' strike in the UK, the miners' leaders knew their phones were tapped. I heard that, on pre-arranged occasions, they would all pick up their phones simultaneously and start uttering the various 'key words' that would initiate the tape recorders - strike, protest, scabs, flying picket, police riot, etc.

If nothing else it would have really pissed off MI5.

I wonder if it would be possible to fill the present day surveillance systems with similar 'protest spam'. Or are the data mining systems too smart for such naive forms of protest?